IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

IF NOT KNOWING IS A SIGN OF THE DEPTHS

If not knowing is a sign of the depths to which

I’ve penetrated the darkness with a handful of fireflies

aspiring to a constellation of their own, something

more shapeshifting than these eighty-eight paradigms

of fixed shining, and managed to lose the starmap en route,

then I’d be urged to say I’ve been negatively illuminated

by every black hole I’ve ever fallen into. How is it with me?

I’ve been pearl diving for singularities and nacreous eclipses.

I have no idea of what I’m looking for that isn’t eventually

going to find me, but I’m a hybrid of wonder

and an agitated curiosity that makes me feel

I’m wasting some crucial element of life

if I don’t go take a look for myself or listen

to the picture-music flowing through me like a mindstream

through the woods at night more acutely than my eyes

can see enlightenment right under their nose

that can tell what it is by the smell. Larkspur or sulphur.

Witness to a dynamic awareness I’m more and more certain

isn’t mine, though it bears my name, I resist being tempted

by a partial fossil of thought to lay claim to it

as if it went to all that effort just to be me. Not self-abnegation,

which is like trying to sweep a mirage out of a desert

with a broom you haven’t learned to ride, but immersion

in an abyss that dwarfs the universe with inconsequence.

I’m more intrigued by the life of meaning as it expresses itself

as a creative medium for the ten thousand meanings of life

scattered like eyelids of apple bloom by the wind

than I am in divining provisional parameters

to rationalize the superstition of reality that regards

its own unactualized potential with an evil eye

that has to be occluded for the sake of pregnant goats.

Just to be here is the most magnificent achievement

though whether you pulled it off or not is definitely moot,

and I tend to intuit when the silence is comprehensive enough

I’m participating in an interdependently originated

creative collaboration where creation is the past tense

of what we’re about to do next without knowing it.

We exit by the entrance. Even spoliation and ruin,

the withered root, the amputated stump, the delinquent blossom

that left it too late, the imaginative context, the seed bed

for the speciation of new life forms arising out of the dead

like a child with flowers in her arms who can’t imagine

what it’s like to be old and see yourself in the doorway

asking where you keep the crayons like stubby buds

in a drawer with a rainbow she wants to draw for you

if you’ve got lots of red, and, as it happens, you do.

PATRICK WHITE